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Thursday, February 10, 2011

I have been "CVSing" for 2-1/2 years, since shortly after I discovered Money Saving Mom and the world of frugal blogging. (If you're not familiar with CVSing and other drugstore bargain shopping, you can read my post here.) In that time I switched from monthly or so $50-$100 trips to Walmart for hygiene and cleaning products to paying under $20/month total for all the products we could use plus many extras to share with family and friends and donate.

I still remember when I rolled over my first ECBs and purchased products for free. What a thrill! At first I would purchase pretty much anything that was on sale if it would be free or free with overage. I would also make multiple trips per week to CVS if they were out of a sale product, or even visit multiple stores. (How did I do that when we only had one car?!)

After a while, however, some of this started to get a bit old. For the past year or so, I have cut down a lot on how much I shop at CVS, skipping a week or two per month. The deals have seemed less spectacular, and they rarely offer coupons off your entire order, as they used to. I also became much more choosy about what items I would purchase. If my family could not use it or I had a definite person or place in mind with which I could share it, I did not buy it, even if it was free.

I was still getting most of the shampoo, toothpaste, and other hygiene items that we needed for free or close to it, but my excitement had faded. Making it to CVS before my ECBs expired had become a chore.

So starting at the beginning of the year I decided to try something new: Walgreens! They built a new Walgreens close to my house about a year ago, so it is just as convenient as CVS. I know from one or two attempts to start "Wags" shopping in the past that I can't possibly keep up with rolling the rewards dollars for more than one store, so in order to do Walgreens I decided to quit CVS for now. I figure that I can always go back if Walgreens doesn't work out.

2 comments:

I am in agreement with you! My CVS patronage has gone way down. I am not getting as many coupons over all and the incentives in my inbox are not enough either. I let a 20% off my entire coupon expire because it couldn't be used on sale or clearance items and full price CVS just isn't worth it. Besides, all that scheming can be tiring!

I'm glad you're human, Liz, and can't run around to different CVS stores with three kids! :) I've never been a CVS fan, simply because of a bad customer service issue I had with them way back. There's a Walgreen's super close to where we moved to, and so I'm interested to hear what you think about them!